The website of writer Kelly J Baker

Posts Tagged ‘family’

Last week, the kiddos and I were watching a movie in our living room strewn with stuffed animals and the occasional Lego. While they watched a movie we’ve already watched at least a dozen times, I tried to finish an assignment on my laptop. (This never really works, and yet, I keep trying.)
The three-year-old stepped closer and closer until he was standing right next to me. He sighed a deep, dramatic sigh and looked at me.

“What’s up, kiddo?,” I asked quietly.

“I’m tired of people asking me about my fingernails,” he said with remarkable frustration.

I closed my laptop and looked at him. His response concerned me. He’s my easygoing, laid back kid who inherited my partner’s easy smile and sense of humor. He doesn’t get frustrated easily, so I knew something was wrong.

“Who asked you about your fingernails?”

“Everybody,” he almost growled.

“Who’s everybody?”

“My friends and my teachers.”

“What did they ask you?”

“Why my fingernails were painted? Why, why, WHY?,” he noted with a belly flop onto the couch. I looked at his blue fingernails and resisted my own urge to sigh dramatically or growl.

My simmering anger has come to define me. It’s familiar, even if it’s not welcome. A steady hum vibrating my bones. Never quite gone because it’s a foundation of who I am.

What I can’t make myself say is that I’m not sure what I’ll do without anger. It’s a long time companion, this rage I have for my father. It used to smother and overwhelm me, but over the years, I sharpened my anger like a sword. It was defense against him. It made me determined. It made me strong. It helped me let him go. I learned to tamp it down and pretend it wasn’t there.

Who would I be without my anger? I don’t know.

I don’t know how to tell her. I keep trying to bring it up but can’t voice the words. Maybe, I’m afraid she’ll convince me to let it go. Maybe, I know she’s right. Maybe, I don’t need it anymore. Maybe, I can move on.

***

Read the rest of my latest TinyLetter on anger and learning to let go here.

For the past two months, when my thumb tapped its way to a digital copy of American Beauty, it wavered, and then wandered away. I feared it. I feared the warm, twangy intro of “Box of Rain,” the memory of my father singing it guilelessly out of tune, of realizing it is Father’s Day today and how I don’t want to call him but reluctantly will, of knowing that this album is going to hurt. It hurts before I even start listening.

But let’s move back. It is 2003. My father and I are driving over 2000 miles from our Illinois suburb to San Diego. I have been accepted to a private liberal arts university that served Orange County’s academically undistinguished nouveau riche. In our cramped Honda Civic, my father has brought along about 100 painstakingly “burned” CDs in individual jewel cases, each with an ink jet printed label in the same nondescript Times New Roman font. There was Joni Mitchell’s Blue in there, and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. But the one we listened to nonstop, through the blank spaces of the I-80 corridor, was American Beauty by the Grateful Dead.(more…)

It was a Saturday in mid-April. The kids were off to Grandma’s house. Chris was working in his office upstairs, listening to music with his headphones on. The rhythmic thump of his foot on the floor above me suggested that he was probably listening to Miranda Lambert or Kacey Musgraves, the current favorite artists of all four Bakers. And I was waiting on him to finish work, so the two of us could spend the day together.

I picked up a broom to sweep and kill time.

My half-hearted attempt at cleaning required a soundtrack, so I pulled up the Amazon Music app on our television and scrolled through the library of music we’ve accumulated in fourteen years of marriage. I passed by Jimmy Eat World, P!nk, the Pitch Perfect 1 and 2 soundtracks, Musgraves, Miranda, Taylor Swift’s 1989, Maroon 5, Kansas, Rachel Platten, Reba, Fall Out Boy, and Journey. None of these artists or albums interested me. I didn’t want to listen to any of them. I searched on.(more…)

Posts of the Recent Past

The Latest Book

Buy Online

The academy claims to be a meritocracy, in which the best and brightest graduate students gain employment as professors. Kelly J. Baker, a Ph.D. in Religion, assumed that merit mattered more than gender. After all, women appeared to be succeeding in higher ed, graduating at higher rates than men. And yet, the higher up she looked in the academic hierarchy, the fewer women there were. After leaving academia, she began to write about gender, labor, and higher ed to figure out whether academia had a gender problem. Eventually, Baker realized how wrong she’d been about how academia worked. This book is her effort to document how very common sexism—paired with labor exploitation—is in higher ed.